In this first lecture, I would just like to lay out what will be some of the main themes for this semester. Where possible, I will also indicate some of the more specific and concrete theses I have been thinking about for some time now. If successful, this overview will give you a sense of where we are going, but of course many concepts will be unclear to you and many claims might strike you as odd, unrelated, or incredible. The purpose of the subsequent sessions will be to make sense of everything (or at least most of) what I will foreshadow below. What is the relationship between technology, rationality, and the profound confusion and alienation that characterizes contemporary life for so many people? Of course, it is a long-standing and widespread belief that technology causes alienation in some way, but I do not think this has been fully demonstrated as well as it could be. There are a few reasons why this ancient idea remains an open case, and a few reasons why I think we are currently in a position to make significant advances on this question. First, we have never had so much data on such a wide variety of social processes. It is now a commonplace to say such things about today’s wealth of data, but due to institutional inertia it remains surprisingly and unfortunately rare for intellectuals and academics to marshal data from beyond their disciplinary purview, in order to attack the genuine and immediate problems of life itself. Our analytical capacities to extract inferences from data are themselves much better today than they were even 30 years ago. A lot of students don’t realize how much of contemporary statistical data analysis was discovered in the 1980s or later. The capacity for average human beings to use these tools really only appears with cheap, mainstream personal computing throughout the 90s. On the one hand, we should be interested in leveraging these new powers, but on the other hand these new powers must themselves be an object of inquiry, for they are essentially info-technological or media powers. What happens to a society when information-processing power dramatically and rapidly increases? We want to use this power to make inferences about the world, but we also want to think critically and philosophically about its effects and what they mean for how we want to conduct ourselves today. Academics usually focus on one of these tasks, at the cost of the other, with empirical social scientists focusing on the former and “critical theorists” focusing on the latter. One of my abiding goals as an intellectual is to do both, with equal methodological seriousness applied to both tasks. Much of what I will discuss can be found in embryonic form throughout the history of ideas, as certain debates surrounding technology are perennially rehashed in response to every new technological advancement. If I build on sometimes ancient insights or even seemingly common platitudes, it is to test, improve, and apply them with everything that is unique to our historical moment. For reasons stated above, some ancient wisdom about technology that we are inclined to interpret metaphorically (before dismissing it) today gains an almost absurdly literal and concrete traction, as in the frightening debates around Artificial Intelligence today. I will also try to provide signposts for what I think are the most interesting and promising avenues for future research, for others to pursue further. It is my wager that, if pursued vigorously and with little respect for all of the pacifying tentacles of institutions and ideologies, we are today in a unique position to possibly solve a number of long-standing riddles about how to organize ourselves and our communities in the direction of ultimate collective liberation. I believe that technology, information, and media are at the heart of what’s gone terribly wrong today, but also the key to unlocking it. “But where danger is, grows the saving power also,” wrote Hölderlin, as cited by Heidegger. ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynjkGIbRLJQ

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